Creeping in My Soul
by Rikkamaru
Summary: Edmund and his daemon are prisoners in the White Witch's castle, touched, tested, and experimented on, and they both feel how it's beginning to affect their soul. LWW AU. Movie-verse. One-shot.


Don't own HDM, LWW or Chronicles of Narnia.

Set during LWW when Edmund's a prisoner of the White Witch.

As a note, I changed some of what determines a daemon's form. All daemons, at birth, have an idea of what their form will look like when their human comes of age. This makes it where they have a series of similar forms that they switch between until their human comes of age. Caellainn, Edmund's daemon, for example, maintains the form of the Eurasian Lynx while in Narnia to comfort Edmund and intimidate some of the larger creatures in Narnia. In Spare Oom she's usually a Bobcat.

Creeping in My Soul

* * *

Edmund groaned and shifted tiredly against the icy wall he was leaning his weight on. He felt his soul tug in his chest, just below and to the right on his sternum, and winced as the tugging became pulling, and the pulling became the equivalent of having the roots of his hair ripped out of his head. The shackles on his ankles seemed to grow even colder as the pain continued, before it slowly began to ease again.

Rattling chains sounded near his cell, and he craned his head to see Ginarrbrik dragging a Lynx to his cell on a chain leash. The Lynx growled and lashed around, trying to fight his control, but began to look relieved when she saw Edmund. Ginarrbrik stopped outside of Edmund's cell and opened the door but, rather than just letting the Lynx go in on her own, he physically picked her up and threw her into the cell roughly, smirking.

Edmund grimaced as cold darkness raked its claws across his soul, and the Lynx cringed as well, her ears lying flat. She tried to shake it off and stumbled forward, her legs shaking slightly before she collapsed in Edmund's lap. She curled up around him in an attempt to keep them both warm and a bid to offer comfort to the miserable boy. The raven haired boy's hand rested on the nape of her neck in thanks, and she purred weakly in response.

Ginarrbrik grinned at the two miserable creatures in the cell and directed his words at them. "We'll do more testing in a few days, but your range in growing. We got her 15 meters before the pain became "unbearable"," he scoffed at the last word and left soon after, their relief in seeing one another boring him.

The two waited until the Black Dwarf was out of sight before Edmund curled up around the Lynx and speaking, his voice giving away his despair. "Oh, Caellainn, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have trusted her. I'm so stupid."

The Lynx, Caellainn, continued to purr and rasped her tongue over his bent forehead. "You didn't know, Edmund. She was the first person we met here, and you didn't know who to trust. Neither of us did."

"And look where my stupidity got us: hated by my siblings, stuck in this dreadful cell, _experimented_ on…" The two shuddered as one as they remembered the witches hands running through Caellainn's fur, through Edmund's _soul_, and watching as the two cringed and writhed in disgust and pain and the sheer _wrongness_ of her touch on something as sacred as Caellainn, Edmund's daemon.

Caellainn had always been the one being in the world Edmund could trust, could love with his entire being without fear of betrayal. She was always with him, be it when he was arguing with Peter and his Jaguar Saethryth, or his few times of comforting Lucy and her Bird of Paradise, Almachius. She was his very soul, and she was growing to only trust him as he only trusted her.

"She's going too far, this White Witch," Caellainn remarked, and Edmund hummed in agreement. He felt it as she did; the stains Jadis was leaving on his soul. He could already see what the Endless Winter and Jadis' touch were doing to Caellainn on the surface level, the way her fur entered a winter coat of silver and grey, with some black marks and a white underbelly. But her taint was already beginning to seep even further than that; Edmund could feel his soul slowly turning colder with each touch, test and experiment.

The boy just sighed in exhaustion, and turned to lie down with his arms wrapped around Caellainn. "We just need to keep surviving, until the day where we just can't."

"Spoken like a true cat," Caellainn said as praise, her purr never ceasing. "Sleep now, Edmund. Sleep and let us try and heal our soul."

And so the two slept, boy and daemon reveling in one other's presence, knowing they wouldn't have much longer until another experiment came up.

* * *

I probably won't be continuing this, I just noticed that there was a lack of HDM AUs with the Narnia series, and so wrote it up. I was also kind of curious on how a daemon might have changed Edmund's experience with the White Witch (and made it infinitely worse).

Please review.

Ja ne!


End file.
